Fwiw it felt like a more concrete difference than that. My overall sense is that the animal welfare projects tended to be backed by multiple people with years of experience doing something relevant, have a concrete near term goal or set of milestones, and a set of well-described steps for moving forwards, while the longtermist/AI stuff tended to lack some or all of that.

I agree with all this. I was just commenting on the issue of debris specifically.

Right, sorry. Yeah, I have no view on whether it's a consideration at all, just that it seems unlikely to be a primary one from my rudimentary understanding of the issue.

It seems like it might not be, for the reasons I suggested or others?

Sanjay's link about Kessler Syndrome above describes the problem. If you mean about the ISS specifically, I think it's just an instance of the general concern.

I'm deeply concerned about space debris, but I don't think it alone could justify this project. A 'controlled' descent sounds like it's about targeting a specific landing spot - an 'uncontrolled' descent could still lower the ISS sufficiently fast as to minimise its chance of hitting orbiting debris (it probably lowers it faster!).

Also the ISS is also already well within Earth's atmosphere, and the lower it gets, the shorter the life of debris hitting it would be due to atmospheric resistance, and it would presumably be relatively easy to control it from hitting anything near the start of its descent, when you can choose when to start the process and only run serious risk as it started to lose control 0 in the lower, thicker atmosphere.

If it were just Eliezer writing a fanciful story about one possible way things might go, that would be reasonable. But when the story appears to reflect his very strongly held belief about AI unfolding approximately like this {0 warning shots; extremely fast takeoff; near-omnipotent relative to us; automatically malevolent; etc} and when he elsewhere implies that we should be willing to cause nuclear war to enforce his priorities, it starts to sound more sinister.

The orthogonality thesis is trivially a motte and bailey - you're using it as one right here! The original claim by Bostrom was a statement against logical necessity: 'an artificial mind need not care intrinsically about any of those things' (emphasis mine); yet in your comment you're equivocating with a statement that's effectively about probability: 'sampling from an extremely tiny section of an enormously broad space'.

You might be right in your claim, but your claim is not what the arguments in the orthogonality thesis papers purport to show. 

I would also like to make a stronger counterclaim: I think a priori arguments about 'probability space' (dis)prove way too much. If you disregard empirical data, you can use them to disprove anything, like 'the height of Earth fauna is contingent on specific details of various evolutionary pressures and environmental circumstances, and is sampled from a tiny section on the number line, so we should expect that alien fauna we encounter will be arbitrarily tall (or perhaps have negative height)'. If Earth-evolved intelligence tends even weakly to have e.g. sympathy towards non-kin, that is evidence that Earth-evolved intelligence is a biased sample, but also evidence that there exists some pull towards non-kin-sympathy in intelligence space. 

My sense is that (as your footnote hints at), the more intelligent animals are, the more examples we seem to see of individual non-reciprocal altruism to non-kin (there are many clear examples of non-reciprocal altruism across species in cetaceans for e.g., and less numerous but still convincing examples of it in corvids).

It gets an auto-upvote from me, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't affect my overall karma score

(though entertainingly given it's non-negative karma after six votes, a few people must have upvoted it :)

Please downvote this comment if you want to signal boost the organisations in the OP without giving me unearned karma.